Posted on 08/16/2009 4:15:43 PM PDT by NCjim
RALEIGH, N.C. — Gov. Beverly Perdue on Tuesday made North Carolina the second state to allow defendants to use statistical evidence to prove racial bias played a role in putting them on death row.
North Carolina joins Kentucky with a law that aims to prevent black defendants from being punished more harshly what whites.
The law allows judges to consider statistical evidence that indicates race played a key factor in putting a disproportionate number of people from a racial group on death row, or on trial for their lives. A judge also could consider sworn testimony from legal system insiders like prosecutors, law enforcement officers, or jurors that death sentences were sought or imposed more often on members of one race than another. A judge who agrees with the evidence could limit a sentence to life in prison without parole.
"I'm a supporter of the death penalty, have been for years. But I've always believed as a citizen ... that the burden is heavier, the very heaviest, in death penalty cases," Perdue said before signing legislation supporters have called the Racial Justice Act. The law is "a grand step forward to ensure that when North Carolina hands down our state's harshest punishment, the decision is based on fact, not prejudice."
(Excerpt) Read more at wral.com ...
By passing a law that judges can look at one side of an argument. They were already able to look at the other side. Oh woe, we can’t do that!
We call them halfbacks. They retire from the northeast to Florida then move halfway back. I grew up in WNC and it is even worse there than here in Raleigh.
The real crime statiscs by race are suppressed. The FBI keeps them under wraps. But you can find them using key words -—> crime statistics interracial Bureau of Justice
thank you
“What’s happened to North Carolina?”
Northeastern liberals are flocking there. NC will be just like Maryland in five years.
a friend told me that the liberals who move are just like locusts.
they swarm a place, ruin it and the move on.
not a bad description of them really
I am from the northeast. I didn’t fit in at all. I brought my conservative catholic values to the south and have not looked back. It is frustrating.
I am in Florida now, but my heart resides in South Carolina......
More pro-crime liberalism....
The real sad part is that, in the guise of “race” when black criminals are sentenced.....is that other blacks were the victims of their crimes, for the most part
Anti-death penalty people are not only immoral....they are racist.
The state is inundated with democrats. Granted, a bit less liberal than northern RATs, but democrats nonetheless.
Retirees tend to be pretty conservative overall.The older you get the more conservative you get.I think that the Research Triangle is more to blame.
A higher standard of evidence will do a lot to eliminate both mistaken prosecutions and mistaken exonerations based on racial profiling. If DNA and other high tech proofs can make sure the evidence is more watertight and render statistical evidence as well, this can raise the public perception that prosecutions are fair regardless of race, and will actually strengthen the case for the death penalty.
NC is a state that voted Obama and a Dimocrat into the Governor’s office. They deserve what they get.
“I’m a supporter of the death penalty......”
Right.
NC has a large population of liberals - located primarily in Chapel Hill and Durham, NC who, along with our minority population and our teachers and State employees keep re-electing the Dems to our state offices.
And it has been one corruption story after another....
From Jim Black, former chief Dem legislator who is still in prison for his crimes
To Easley, former Governor, who is being investigated right now for assorted crimes
To of course John Edwards, need we say more?...
To Erskine Bowles who ran for Senate and now heads what has become a corrupt University of NC Jobs program (for the likes of Mrs. Easley -= who got a whopping salary at NCSU and then 3 people associated with that job appointment have resigned from NCSU)....
Power corrupts and total power corrupts totally.
But we just need a LOT MORE CONSERVATIVES to move here!
We are now the highest taxed state in the S. East.
It used to be such a nice place to live....
Which one of the senior representatives in the senate/house are you referring to as conservative? Kennedy? Frank? Pelosi? Waters? Dodd? The list is LONG. Don’t the people who send them there reside in those northeastern states? If the seniors are the ones leaving and coming to states like NC and FL, and now these states are turning blue, it doesn’t sound like that theory will hold water.
I do hold out hope for a whole bunch of conservative seniors with this healthcare fiasco. They are finally getting to see the logical ends to their years of dreaming of a communal/socialist society.
These comments specifically exclude any veterans/families as I have yet to meet a liberal in this crowd of seniors.
Actually not. The cost of paperwork and detailed record keeping and statistical analysis is SO prohibitive, with this new law, that the definite practical implication is that no prosecutor will seek the death penalty for anyone anymore.
I heard a well informed prosecuting attorney interviewed about this after it passed the legislative vote--and the way the law is written, if you can find any STATISTICAL evidence at all of racial bias in a murder case ANYWHERE in the state (and that would be saying 40% of murderers occurred in a county with only 20% blacks, for example) then it would require a full review....by statistical mathematicians.... The statisticians are by NO MEANS behind this law...though some are--so you'd have a battle expert witness egg-heads which very few judges or lawyers (let alone juries) would be able to understand. Hence, no reliable judicial review or appeal process....
Bottom line is, with this new law, no one will be put to death in NC any more--especially any blacks, as it will be just too expensive and time consuming to do so.
Apparently that's exactly what the authors of this horrible law intended. Banning the death penalty by the back door.
You might go looking for some of them down at Hilton Head (where a whale of a lot of USPS headquarters people retire).
There's a big problem with your train of thought.The Northesterners retiring to NC are among the more affluent residents of the region.The many,many,*many* welfare recipients...the "victims of a fascist America"...who live in the region,who are most likely to vote RAT,tend not to be very mobile in their later years.Florida could be a somewhat different story for reasons that would take too long for me to explain.
Actually, the Death Penalty is on hold in NC already - because the Doctors who are required to be present at executions have refused to be required to be there. So we have had a moratorium on death penalties being carried out for quite awhile now.
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